The 8 Most Important Synths in the Development of Hip Hop

Nothing is more synonymous with Hip Hop than the sampler – a cornerstone on which Hip Hop is built. Without Kool Herc’s beat juggling of “breaks” from Soul, Disco, Jazz and Funk records there would be no Hip Hop and none of the countless breakbeat inspired genres that spawned off the back off its legacy.

Drum machines play huge role too. Similarly to the early advents of Chicago House and Detroit Techno, drum machines allowed producers to orchestrate beats themselves, with no need for a drum kit or someone to play it. The likes of the Oberheim DMX, Linn Drum and of course Roland TR-808 are as much of the sound of early Hip Hop records as the plundered breakbeats and samples are.

There already exists a a plethora of homages to the most popular Hip Hop samples or the the most influential drum machines, which I wont add to. Today I want to talk about Hip Hop’s love affair with the synthesiser.has

In the early 70s synthesisers went from being a piece of furniture only afforded to eccentric laboratory dwellers to a portable, sonically innovative and funky hit-maker that changed how we think about sound more than any acoustic instrument has done since.

Moog are widely regarded as one of the Godfathers of modern subtractive synthesis but during the 70s ARP, EMS, Korg and Oberheim contributed fantastically, and their synths are plastered all over every genre of music from Krautrock to Space Disco, P-Funk to Italo, Prog-Rock to New Wave and everything in between.

The genesis of Hip Hop is about sampling, and in this article I want to look at some of the perhaps overlooked contributors to the genre.

We all know about James Brown and The Winstons, we know about the MPCs and drum machines, but what the synths that most shaped Hip Hop?

01. Moog Minimoog

It’s hard to look past the importance of the Minimoog not just on Hip Hop but only contemporary music as a whole. Released in 1970, the Minimoog was one of the first portable synthesisers and has changed music for ever.

A monophonic subtractive synth comprising of three VCOs (voltage controlled oscillators) producing just simple geometric waveforms and it’s famed 4-pole 24dB/oct low pass ladder filer, the Minimoog could be considered an unassuming unit.

It’s partly the American over-engineering that people love about Moog, every dial turn feels like you’re really making a difference. Each click of the oscillator is satisfying.

It is of course the sound of the Moog that has really made ripples in music though, and while there are numerous records we could pick on, a good place to start is Fred Wesley & The JB’s Blow Your Head from 1974, produced by none other than The Godfather of Soul himself, James Brown.

Brown is wrongly credited with playing the Minimoog on this record, it’s actually played by another funk legend and breakbeat maestro Bobby Byrd (of Hotpants fame).

The unmistakeable squelchy resonant filters have been sampled by Digable Planets, Aaliyah, Zinc and of course Public Enemy:

The G-Funk era of Hip Hop in particular owes a lot to the Minimoog and in particular Bernie Worrell of Parliament and Funkadelic fame. Listening through to their greatest hits is like a journey through Hip Hop sampling.

Parliament and Funkadelic are two separate bands that shared many members, while Funkadelic were more synonymous with the early crossover of funk and psychedelic rock, it’s Parliament that coined the term P-Funk.

Both bands shared core members, the aforementioned Bernie Worrell on Moog and Solina duties, Bootsy Collins on bass and band leader and afro-futurist visionary George Clinton.

Parliament have been sampled by Ice Cube, Digital Underground, Snoop Dogg, Method Man and Redman, MC Hammer and of course De La Soul to name but a few.

I’m reliable informed that the Minimoog was a staple in the studio of the late J Dilla, and I stumbled across this interesting guide about how he went about programming it.

Original Minimoogs retail north of $3000 these days, and while Moog have reissued it with the Model D, it’s similarly priced. Luckily the folk at Arturia have released a fantastic software alternative, the Mini-V. More flexible and a little easier on the wallet.

02. ARP Pro-Soloist

Unlike the Minimoog which is plastered over a myriad of records, ARP’s Pro-Soloist sees the majority of it sampling off of just one track, the 1973 Ohio Players hit Funky Worm.

Apart from having one of the most sampled breaks in the intro, it contains two prominent instrumental breaks.

The first cut is four bars long and starts at around 0.47. It’s is a squealing portamento line that could easily be confused for an air horn, the second two bars are where most samples are taken from:

It has been sampled by N.W.A (at least twice), Snoop Dogg, 2Pac and Biggie and has been interpolated by The Game and many more. The line is in fact so pervasive in Hip Hop it’s almost become part of the furniture like Slick Rick’s La Di Da Di, Change the Beat or the Amen break.

The second instrumental break starts around 1.31. It has a softer attack on the filter envelope compared to the first line. Both samples are contextualised by the impossibly groovy back beat provide by the rest of the band.

This has been sampled by Xzibit, Redman, DMX and perhaps most famously DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince:

The Pro-Soloist is probably considered quite rudimentary by today’s standards, and it certainly didn’t have anywhere near the flexibility of later ARP productions. The sound generation was characterised by preset buttons (found on early Korg and Roland synths too) controlling a single VCO. GForce have this to say about the Pro-Soloist:

In terms of features, the Pro-Soloist was a monophonic, single oscillator synth that generated Pulse and Sawtooth waveforms. Well… when I say Sawtooth, the truth is that in order to keep costs down the Sawtooth waveform is derived from 5 pulse waveforms summed to create a 64 step waveform that’s very, very close in shape to a Sawtooth. Clever eh?

There are also three resonator banks that tailor the filtering, together with a low pass filter and envelope generator, all of which converge to create your ready made presets. This is all behind the scenes though and what the player ends up with is minimal set of controls so they focus on what matters most to a real player… the performance.

The performance was further enhanced by what we regard as the killer feature, namely an expression section that gave the player control over things like vibrato, pitch bend, brilliance, growl, wow & volume via a pressure sensitive keyboard. Yep, despite there being no velocity sensitivity, with the original Soloist, ARP had created the first mainstream synths with aftertouch.

Getting your hands on an original Pro-Soloist would be a tough ask, but scouring eBay or Craigslist would be a good start. There aren’t any well known software alternatives I’m aware.

I’ll leave you with Billy Beck from the Ohio Players jamming through this, though using Yamaha and Casio synths.

03. The Vocoder

Since Science Fiction had been prevalent in film, television and literature, we had lofty visions of the future. During the 1970s, avant-garde space jazzer Sun Ra, an alien from Saturn, led his Arkestra around the country preaching a message of peace, black nationalism, ancient Egyptian mysticism and numerology.

We’ve already name checked George Clinton’s Parliament as a pioneers of an African vision of space too – a more psychedelic, perhaps light-hearted immersive experience that certainly gained more commercial success.

However by the time the 80s came by, music and cinema has a more dystopian outlook of the future. Culture seemed less optimistic and more paranoid about the cyberpunk world communicated in films such as Total Recall, Blade Runner, Akira and The Terminator, and the Vocoder was the synth that narrated our journey into this we were told of.

The vocoder (a portmanteau for voice encoder) seemingly combined two signals together. They worked by analysing frequency bands of a modulator signal (commonly a voice) and using a series of envelope followers and VCAs (voltage controlled amplifiers) mapping them to corresponding bands on a carrier signal, for example a synth.

This gave the impression of a talking synth or robotic voice, depending on your point of view.

There are too many Vocoders used in this period to detail each, so I’m grouped them all together but famous units from this era include the Roland SVC-350, Korg VC-10 (above), EMS Vocoder 2000 and Moog’s own Vocoder.

Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock is perhaps one of the most striking examples of the vocoder being used in early Hip Hop history.

This interpolates two separate Kraftwerk tracks, Arthur Baker replays the melody from TransEurope Express while the 808 beat from Numbers was also reprogrammed (additionally there’s an orchestral hit is a sample from the Fairlight). [Thanks Bim!]. It’s also been sampled by Kendrick Lamar, Erykah Badu, Public Enemy and Nick Javas & DJ Premier.

Giorgio Moroder, perhaps more known for his recent collaborations with Daft Punk and perhaps historically for his work with Donna Summer has been sampled by a plethora of Hip Hop artists too. He’s been sampled by OutKast, Kanye, KRS-One, Mobb Deep, DJ Shadow and El-P, but it J Dilla’s 2006 E=MC² that contains some tasty vocoder action:

It wouldn’t be much of a vocoder chat if I didn’t mention Kanye West’s 2007 Stronger. The song makes heavy use of Daft Punk’s Harder Better Faster, which actually in turn samples a Edwin Birdsong song.

Lastly, I couldn’t mention vocoders without bringing up Herbie Hancock’s 1977 album Sunlight. The album features plenty of vocoder, in particular the tracks Thought it was You (samples by Slum Village and more pertinently 9th Wonder) and Come Running to Me, again sampled by Slum Village and also Thundercat.

04. Korg Triton

Once a mainstay in every studio, Korg’s flagship workstation keyboard is responsible for some of the biggest hits of Pharrell’s career, particularly during his Neptunes work, which is what I want to focus this on.

The late 90s and early 00s were truly an era dominated by the workstation keyboards. At the time, computers were had become the dominant platform to produce electronic music, but soft synths and such weren’t not as commonplace as they are today.

Workstations offered a huge plethora of professional sounds from your bread and butter strings, orchestral hits, guitars and pianos to drums, basses and more synthetic leads and pads. The were quite simply an entire band-in-a-box.

Below is a list of some of the presets from the Triton Pharrell used on some of the tracks he produced. It’s by no means complete and probably doesn’t scratch the surface of how extensively it’s been used, but it’s a start:

• Busta Rhymes – Light Your Ass On Fire (B447 Jungle Drum Kit)
• Clipse – Cot Damn (A001 Acoustic Piano)
• Clipse – Grindin’ (B116 Percussion Kit)
• Clipse – I’m Not You (D015 Warm Steel)
• Fabolous – Young’n (A021 Chorus E. Guitar)
• Jay-Z – I Just Wanna Love U (B069 Strato-Chime)
• Jay-Z – Nigga Please (A116:Orchestra&Ethnic) [No YouTube video for this… What you saying Tidal?]
• Justin Timberlake – Rock Your Body (D031 GlassBell Bright)
• Nelly – Flap Your Wings (A096 Digital PolySix)
• N.O.R.E. – I’m A G (B115 Harmonica)
• N.O.R.E. – Nothin’ (B045 BambuSilverFlute) [below]
• Various Songs (A035 Arco Strings)
• Various Songs (B117 Dynamic E.Guitar)
• Various Songs (A076 Old & Analog)
• Vanessa Marquez – Good Girl (B002 StaccatoPizzHit)
• 702 – I Still Love You (A051 PizzEnsamble)

This extensive list was researched and compiled by the excellent Mathew Garland.

The Triton was part ROMpler, part synth, part arranger and saw many incarnations, with the first coming to market in 1999. It was multi-timbral, had 62 voice polyphony and (up to) 88 semi-weighted keys.

05. ARP 2600

There aren’t many synthesisers more recognisable in looks alone than the ARP 2600. Released in 1971 and in production for a decade, this gigantic blue semi-modular towers over other synthesisers in the studio. Comprising of three individual cabinets, the synth voice, an optional sequencer and separate keyboard, there are different configurations that can be seen on stage or in the studio of various producers.

The ‘2600 is on records from Frank Zappa to George Duke, Joe Zawinul to The Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder to Todd Terje and a myriad others that fill up a whole page alone here. One artist I want to focus on in particular though is that of Dexter Wansel.

Wansel is one of the artists I most closely associate with the cosmic jazz idiom that was so popular in the mid-to-late seventies, but Parliament Funkadelic had their idiosyncratic style, as did Wansel. His music is much grander orchestrations, with smooth saxophone, blissful strings, ethereal chord progressions and crunchy Rhodes. More David Axelord than Sun Ra.

Below, he discusses layering his synths with the orchestra, something so obvious to us now, but at the time the synthesisers was still seen as its own entity almost.

Dexter perhaps isn’t as much of a household name as some of the aforementioned artist in this section, but he’s been sampled by the likes of J Dilla, Pete Rock, DJ Shadow, Lupe Fiasco, Lil B, Action Bronson, Royce Da 5’9” and Wiz Khalifa.

N.B I’ll deliberately omitted HUGE samples from other artists that have samples drums or non-synthetic elements, otherwise the above list would include Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Ta-Ku, Tyler the Creator, Eric B. and Rakim and Rick Ross.

Life on Mars (from 1976) is perhaps one of his magnum opus, with a sound like Dr. Lonnie Smith, Isaac Hayes and Pharoah Sanders write a film soundtrack together.

The 2600 is responsible for some of the most sci-fi sounds of our time (think R2-D2) but what Wansel got out of it was a really musical sound, seamlessly incorporating it with the orchestra, adding previously undiscovered depths.

The instrument itself is comprises of 3 VCOS, a 24 dB/oct low-pass filter, ring modulation, spring reverb, noise generation and a choice of linear of exponential VCAs. But what really made the instrument stand out is the ability to patch anything into anything else. For those who missed the Moog Modular first time around, or the EMS Synthi A, this was a realistic modular option.

ARP 2500s and 2600s aren’t impossible to get hold of on second hand sites and specialist shops. Certainly part of the fun with any modular or semi-modular is patching it but Arturia have released the 2600V, a much more stable and reliable emulation that sounds fantastic to my ears.

06. Roland Fantom G

No list would be complete with this, right?

Damn son where’d you find this?!

The Fantom G, that’s where.

Like the Korg Triton, the Fantom G was another workstation, this time released by Roland in 2009. The Fantom ‘G’ was a fourth generation in the series of workstation by Roland, and offered much of the same functionality as the Triton, albeit more modern. Anyway, back to this sound…

Colloquially known as The Lex Lugar riser, next to booming 808 kicks and frenetic snappy hi-hats, there aren’t many sounds more synonymous with trap than this.

It’s extremely unlikely this sound is reproduced each time it’s used, more likely it that is came from a trap sample pack that was doing the p2p rounds that I can’t remember the name of.

The riser is actually a stock preset on the Fantom G, but is relatively easy to recreate in certain software synths. Here’s a quick tutorial in Reason:

For any Native Instruments Kontakt users, ProducerGrind have released this free library of sounds from the Fantom. Find out more about it and download here.

07. Yamaha DX100

There are arguments about the genesis of Hip Hop and what constitutes Hip Hop and what’s electro funk. The DX100 was an FM synthesiser and younger sibling of the famed-DX7. It is plastered all over Zapp & Roger and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis records, and for this reason deserves a honourable mention in this list.

Zapp & Roger was Roger and Terry “Zapp” Troutman’s brainchild. One of their biggest hits was More Bounce to the Ounce, released in 1980. The song contains Zapp & Rogers now famed talkbox and is riddled with classic sounding synths inseparable from the era.

This song alone has been sampled by Biggie, Slum Village, Ice Cube, Dâm-Funk, El-P, Eazy-E, Blackstreet, MC Hammer, Coolio, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg (twice), Public Enemy and EPMD.

Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis are perhaps more closely linked to the Minneapolis sound and latterly New Jack Swing, which is in its own right a cousin of Hip Hop.

They are perhaps most famed for their production work on the likes of Janet Jackson, Boyz II Men, New Order, Usher, the S.O.S Band, Mary J. Blige, Earth, Wind & Fire, Blu Cantrell, Mariah Carey, Chaka Khan, Cheryl Lynn and (weirdly) Big Daddy Kane:

Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were also founding members of Prince’s band The Time, along with Morris Day. They have been sampled by the likes of Timberland, 2Pac, Salt-N-Pepa, Public Enemy and DJ Assault. Of course most of The Times works were released before 1985, so it’s unlikely any of these used a DX100, it having not been invented, but it goes someway to demonstrating the ripples left by these two.

As mentioned above, they also worked extensively on the S.O.S band (sampled by MF DOOM and 2Pac), The Human League (sampled by Rick Ross and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony) and of course Janet Jackson (sampled by Big Pun, Xzibit, DJ Battery Brain and Lil Jon).

So why was the DX100 so popular with this sound? Unlike the DX7 the 100 was markedly more portable and less complicated to program. Although pretty much the entire range of FM synths by Yamaha are all a bit of a headache, compared to the DX7 it only had four operators instead of six.

Also, because it was digital, polyphony (8 voices) and patch saving was possible, as well as aftertouch and velocity sensitivity – all unimaginable with most analogue synthesisers. Frequency modulation synthesis was also a new sound: it allowed previously impossible sounds to be conjured up.

Subtractive synthesisers certainly were still in rotation on many of these records, by FM brought the possibility of shimmery pads, complex polyphonic stabs, bell-like leads and tough, snappy bass lines, all of which are key to the sound of eighties electro funk.

There might well be some DX100 emulation out there but by far the best FM synthesiser I am aware of is Native Instrument’s FM8, and with a bit of creative Googling you can get the SysEx patches for the DX100 easily enough. To read more about FM synthesis, follow this link.

08. Fairlight CMI

It was a toss up between the Synclavier and Fairlight and in the end the Fairlight just edged it. The Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, to give it it’s full name, is one of the most influential but unobtainable behemoth of synth history.

Combining a workstation like approach to sampling, a 16-voice polyphonic, multi-timbral additive and frequency modulation synthesis algorithm, sequencing and even a touch screen computer. You can see Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones jamming on Herbie’s Fairlight in the below video:

The Fairlight is not something that you could realistically buy, produced between 1979 – 1992 it would have cost more than a mortgage and programming one would have been a nightmare, but they existed in studios and ended up on plenty of records from the era.

However it’s Malcolm McLaren that I want to talk about. McLaren was a punk polymath, dipping his toes in fashion, promoting and managing of bands, visual art and of course production.

He’s probably most notably known for managing the Sex Pistols, his work with Art of Noise and The New York Dolls, and having a huge hand in the development of both Punk and Hip Hop in the UK. There are claims he brought Hip Hop to the UK but that’s a subject to be debated by far more learned people than me.

His own music took a huge influence form Hip Hop, and is like a quirky collage or pop-art homage to it. There is a clear passion for sampling, scratching and new synth sounds. One of his better know song is Buffalo Gals, not only sampling and interpolating a plethora of sources but drenched in Fairlight and Linn Drum:

The Fairlight was key in the development of sampling, but unlike the Akai and E-Mu counterparts, the CMI allowed for an incredible level of sound design. Virtually any sound could be approximated by analysing the timbral shifts over time and re-synthesising them a complex set of envelope and harmonics generators.

This definition is lazy but that’s because this is such a hard process to describe it would need it own article.

It was plastered all over McLaren’s productions as well as other producer from the era, not least Trevor Horn, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, Brian Wilson, Jan Hammer, Thomas Dolby, Devo, Prince, Madonna, Soul II Soul, Scritti Politti, Jean-Michel Jarre, the Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, Steve Winwood, Hall & Oates, Kate Bush, Michael Jackson, Peter Gabriel, Paul McCartney, David Gilmour, Teddy Riley, Duran Duran, and Paul Hardcastle. McLaren had this to say about the synth:

It was one of those things where I didn’t know where to start with them. I said: “The thing you do, scratching the records, is really amazing. I’ve got this thing here called the Fairlight and it does the same thing with digital audio. Let me show you, the possibilities are endless.”

via RBMA.

I daren’t Google the price of a working Fairlight but I’d guess it’s probably close to the GDP of some small island countries.

****

Enter through your right ventricle clog up your bloodstream
Heart terminal like Grand Central Station
Program fat basslines on Novation
Getting drunk like I’m fucking ducking five-year probation

RZA, Triumph

Thanks to Hip Hip anorak Mfon for helping me source some of the lesser-known tracks in this article.